Thoughts on Scrum & UI design

Yesterday I had a chance to work with UX experts (User expirience specialists, or siply the UI guys). We are developing our project by using scrum. As you probably know scrum is designed to develop application in iterative way. So that means every X (usually 2 or 3 weeks) scrum team is ready with a product which is potentially shippable.

One drawback of agile methodologies is that no one knows how the final product will look like. 

Typically the UI guys look at the application and ask a few simple questions:

1.     Who is the main actor of the application?

2.     What the actor usually do (90% of their time)?

3.     What is the most used part of system?

4.     And how one thing is related to another.

So the goal of these questions is to find out the key usage scenarios. 

I was impressed then UI guys presented their vision (wireframes) on how application can look like. We as developers are focused on the accomplishing the functionality, reaching the goal, the deadlines, but often we forget that the user is the main actor.

To sum up, I think we should involve UX experts from the very beginning of development the application. In the end, the UI is what the user sees and it is important to foresee the most used functions in the app and focus on them in the first place.